Health
With regard to phase 2 of the COVID-19 vaccination programme in the province:
(1) How many people have been (a) registered to receive vaccines to date and (b) vaccinated to date;
(2) whether all the healthcare workers in the province have been vaccinated; if not, (a) how many healthcare workers still need to be vaccinated and (b) what is the reason for the process not being completed;
(3) (a) what is the current daily average number of registrations in the province recorded on the Electronic Vaccination Data System (EVDS) and (b) how many doses of the vaccine have been received per week since the start of phase 2 to date;
(4) whether there are any challenges pertaining the EVDS that her Department is aware of that present challenges to the roll-out programme in the province; if so, what are the relevant details?
1. As at 1 June 2021,
(a) 483 559 people were registered (163 010 health workers and 320 504 over 60s)
(b) 158 154 people have been vaccinated
2. (a) All healthcare workers have not yet been vaccinated.
This is difficult to estimate for the following reasons:
1. The number of health workers in the private sector is uncertain.
2. A significant number of people indicated that they were health workers when they were not. The result is that our registration data for health workers has been impacted.
3. The definition of a health- worker is broad. It includes everyone involved in healthcare in any way, in the private and public sector, as well as all support staff.
4. Some staff have exercised their right not to take the vaccine. This is not a compulsory vaccine.
5. In total, we have vaccinated 94 923 health workers
(b) The Department of Health has made every effort to vaccinate as many health workers as possible and vaccinations are ongoing.
We received 91 732 vaccines from the Sisonke Trial. This was not enough to vaccinate all health workers in the private and public sector in the Western Cape. It is for this reason that we have continued with vaccinations of health workers as part of the National Vaccine Rollout. This is called phase 1b and it is a national programme.
3. (a) The Electronic Vaccination Data System opened for 44 days since its launch date on 16 April. Since then, we have seen a daily average of 7 284 registrations of over 60 year olds.
(b) Johnson & Johnson
13 160 doses during 17 – 28 February 2021
12 800 on 15 March 2021
18 080 during 16 – 28 March 2021
9 760 during 29 March – 10 April 2021
42 080 during12 – 15 May 2021
Pfizer
33 930 on 14 May
35 100 on 22 May
29 250 on 24 May
25 740 on 27 May
Expect 72 540 on 3 June
4. As with any new data management system, there were some initial challenges. These related to scheduling and delays of SMS being issued. In some instances people were sent their appointment SMS’ the night before or to attend a site outside of their area.
The Western Cape Department of Health has engaged with National and have been given partial access to scheduling capabilities and aim to send out notification SMS’ at least three days in advance as well as scheduling the number of slots per site based on the number of vaccines for each day at sites.
